Google threatens Microsoft Sharepoint with cloud collaboration

Can Google Wave water down Microsoft SharePoint revenue?

With its latest service offering, Wave, web giant Google is encroaching further on to Microsoft's lawn. The incursion comes as Microsoft unveiled its latest attempt to unseat Google with an update of its search engine, now called Bing. Can IT leaders hope to benefit from this technological muscle-flexing?

Certainly, if Google's Wave system delivers on its promise of pushing online collaboration into the cloud, IT leaders may have a low-cost alternative to Microsoft's enterprise collaboration SharePoint package.

The opportunity for Microsoft to make headway with Bing is much less clear. Google has by most estimates somewhere above 60 per cent of the web search market; Microsoft's share is paltry in comparison.

Microsoft's dilemma is not lost on industry experts, who see Google forging ahead with new revenue-earning technology, while its lagging competitor in search is being forced to pause and fix what is "old" technology.

Microsoft is playing catch-up in fields now almost considered commodity areas, said Datamonitor senior analyst Vuk Trifkovic. And while Bing might represent a vast improvement on Microsoft's previous efforts, it offers precious little advantage over other search engines, he added.

"Google, however, has gone for a bolder approach," said Trifkovic, "and not just in terms of products and functionality. Because where you could say that many of these features are already scattered across the landscape of social media, collaboration and communication, Wave is also a new platform which could be extended to add new applications on top of it."

Google Wave will have features allowing users to see what colleagues are writing almost instantly, said Lars Rasmussen, Google software engineering manager.

Wave will also have a playback feature which Google says will be able to integrate with other web applications. Because Wave uses open application programming interfaces, it would allow developers to build extensions to Google Wave, or applications that interoperate with it, added Rasmussen.

From Microsoft's point of view, the most threatening aspect of Wave is its potential to compete against Microsoft's SharePoint platform, especially since Google has announced it will open-source Wave within the coming months.

"If Google actually wraps the rest of its collaboration suite – especially Google applications, GMail and everything else it has – around the Wave platform in a very compelling way, it could potentially target SharePoint users within enterprises," said Trifkovic.

However, Trifkovic notes that while Google has unveiled its plans for Wave, it had yet to deliver on its potential. "Wave is a pretty preliminary announcement, and it remains to be seen how well Google manages to sell this into enterprises. "

And Rob Bamforth, principal communications and collaboration analyst at Quocirca, argued that while low-cost technology may win converts, enterprise IT leaders would have more stringent security and uptime criteria to meet before deploying the services.

"There certainly comes a point when free and good enough, overtake billed and potentially better – at least until something 'big' goes wrong, but that's part of where [cloud service providers] need to make sure its protection is solid, from security threats and continuity problems," he said.